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Short Story Of An Hour Irony

Decent Essays

Kate Chopin uses the literary element of irony throughout the short story “The Story of an Hour” in which the character Mrs. Mallard has to go through after a tragic event. Mrs. Mallard and her husband live together in a house. One day Mrs. Mallard’s sister and her husband’s friend heard the news that Mr. Mallard had died and tell Mrs. Mallard what happened. This short story describes in an abundance of detail what her inner thoughts in that one hour are and how it affects her sister and her husband’s friend as they try to keep her safe and calm. In the short story, “The Short Story of an Hour” is written by the author Kate Chopin which is about one eventful hour of Louise Mallard the wife of Brently Mallard. In the short story “The Story …show more content…

Mallard dies and Mrs. Mallard cries because she is happy, not sad. While Mrs. Mallard is crying upstairs in her bedroom she has some mixed emotions. It is written and cleared up by the author stating, “She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial... She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind…”( Chopin 261) In this scene, Mrs. Mallard is very joyful because her husband died. In the story, she was crying in her bedroom. As it fools the reader to think she is weeping for her husband who ‘died’. She is actually crying because she is joyful from her unhappy marriage. The Mallard couple unhappy marriage is another key piece of information that leads to the situational irony in this scene. “Representative of this in both approach and language is Emily Toth's well-known characterization of the story as one of Chopin's "most radical ... an attack on marriage, on one person's dominance over another."3 Toth further elaborates this position in a later article in which she comments that "[although Louise's death is an occasion for deep irony directed at patriarchal blindness about women's thoughts, Louise dies in the world of her family where she has always sacrificed for others.”(Berkove 152) This article talks about the irony of her marriage and how her unhappy marriage is a factor of why she dies. The critic Berkove analyzes and explains what the doctors said about how Mrs. Mallard dies at the very end of the short story. Mr. Mallard and Mrs. Mallard’s marriage causes Mrs. Mallard's to react how she did to her husband's death, with joy not with

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